High speed readout electronics development for frequency-multiplexed kinetic inductance detector design optimization

Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) are a promising solution for space-borne mm-wave astronomy. To optimize their design and make them insensitive to the ballistic phonons created by cosmic-ray interactions in the substrate, the phonon propagation in silicon must be studied. A dedicated fast readout electronics, using channelized Digital Down Conversion for monitoring up to 12 MKIDs over a 100 MHz bandwidth was developed. Thanks to the fast ADC sampling and steep digital filtering, In-phase and Quadrature samples, having a high dynamic range, are provided at ~ 2 Msps. This paper describes the technical solution chosen and the results obtained.